McCollum Proposes Amendment to Ban Death Penalty

From Minnesota Monitor:

Rep. Betty McCollum introduced a Constitutional amendment to ban the death penalty Wednesday in part to coincide with the visit of Pope Pope Benedict XVI, the world's most well known death penalty opponent. In addition, McCollum's proposal comes the same day the U.S. Supreme Court found lethal injection to be a constitutional method of capital punishment, thereby ending a 7 month moratorium on capital punishment in the United States.

"Criminals who are found guilty of committing heinous acts should be sentenced to life in prison as a punishment and for the wellbeing of society," McCollum said in a press release. "The death penalty, by contrast, does not serve society's interests - it is damaging and harmful. Fighting crime, achieving justice, and elevating human dignity are all damaged by state-sponsored executions. We know the death penalty is more expensive to implement than regular sentences, it does not reduce crime, and it imposes a shared societal responsibly for killing another human being on behalf of a justice system that is clearly not perfect."

...Given the lack of support for ending the death penalty in the United States, McCollum's amendment will likely be a symbolic gesture intended to generate a discussion on an issue in which Catholics and progressives agree. "The Supreme Court's decision today was painful for those of us who believe the death penalty is immoral," said McCollum. "No one can respond with greater moral authority or spiritual wisdom on this subject than His Holiness."

I wonder how many Catholics really agree. I wonder if the Catholics on the Supreme Court agree. I wonder if the Pope brought up the death penalty with the former Texas governor and prominent supporter of the death penalty. Good for Rep. McCollum.

Update: On the Christianity Today blog report on the Supreme Court decision today affirming the constitutionality of the method of lethal injection used, we learn:

American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) guidelines say use of the method to put down animals is unacceptable.

Makes you proud to be an American in this "Christian" nation.

Where Jim Wallis Stands

Sojourner's founder Jim Wallis answers questions in Christianity Today on abortion, gay rights, the war in Iraq, and more. And he reminds that he is not a theological liberal:

But there has never been a doubt that I am an evangelical. In fact, the Sojourners community had its fatal split many years ago when a number of people in the community, including some of my fellow elders, really wanted to change our theological orthodoxy and were attracted to people like Matthew Fox, the creation spirituality theologian. And I just said, "Matthew Fox is a heretic, and we're committed to the central lordship of Jesus Christ and the authority of the Scriptures."

And they said, "Well, we're not. Not all of us."

I said, "Well, Sojourners is. Even if you're not, Sojourners is and it's going to remain that way." I was accused of hierarchy and patriarchy, they quit, and we split. And that was the end of the residential community in some ways. But I took a stand, as I always did, for orthodoxy.

There is a conversation in our place that is ongoing about how evangelical or ecumenical we are, and not all of our folks are as evangelical as I am. But I'm the founder and president still. I'm not dead yet. I went to Trinity because I wanted to have this discussion in the evangelical world. And then for a long time evangelicals weren't really responding to us at Sojourners. Now they are.

I find it interesting that in this same article he says that Episcopalians should not split over the issues dividing them:

But the church shouldn't divide over this. They should stay together, live with their differences, keep talking, and respect each other's opinions.

Like Wallis did at Sojourners?

The Future of the Church of the Brethren

Yesterday I had lunch with a Church of the Brethren (COB) friend and we were talking about how long it would take for our denomination to die. This person suggested that within 15 years everything the COB now owns or runs will be in the hands of Mennonites. I had to admit that I had never considered this possibility. I countered that I think within 10 years the conservative faction will have withdrawn from the COB and merged with their more natural religious soul-mates, the Brethren Church. We will see if either of us is right.

What seems clear to me, though, is that our present path as a denomination is in a death spiral. Our institutional center is re-organizing, again. The deck chairs will be shuffled once more. Although it is financially untenable to maintain two denominational headquarters, in IL and MD, leaders were unable to pull the plug on either one.

Although our annual meeting, Annual Conference, has been paired from a week to a few days, it is still a money-loser. It would make more sense to have our national gathering every other year. On the other hand our annual meeting may be the only thing still holding us together.

We have two factions in the church, liberal and conservative, who are equally stubborn in their unwillingness to compromise on core issues. I am part of the liberal faction. We have a weak institutional center that is scared to death of picking sides. Some are genuinely conflicted. Some have their hearts in one place but their wallets in another.

Meanwhile we bleed members and churches. Our churches, declining in number though they are, can't find pastors from within the COB fold. So they go outside and find pastors with no interest in the COB. They've got their Bible and their paycheck, and that is all that matters. So inevitably these churches drift away from the denomination.

Denominations are dying everywhere. What is happening to the COB is not unique. But because we are smaller to begin with we are more at risk of making a quick exit.

I have no interest in reviving a dying denomination. I do, however, have an interest in participating in a movement that is progressive and based on the very best of COB values. Little by little I am seeing more and more of my progressive COB brothers and sisters coming to this same place. The time has come to stop putting energy into breathing life into a dying institution or gatherings where we bring members of the two stubborn factions together to talk things over.

I have no ill feelings toward those conservatives. I respect them for their strong beliefs and disagree with them on every one. I have no interest in trying to get them to change their minds, and I don't want to use the precious amount of time I have in my life listening to them tell me why I am going to hell. We will see who is right soon enough.

In the meantime. it is time to begin thinking about what a new structure will look like. Perhaps the place to begin is with a district made up of progressive churches and individuals that crosses geographical boundaries. Perhaps the time has come to begin channel outreach monies into this kind of structure. Our fall gathering of COB progressives in Indiana may be a good first step.

I don't know what it will look like yet, but what I do know is that within 10 years the COB will no longer exist in its current form. It is time to begin planning now for a different future.

Why Do People Love the Tibetans and Not the Christians?

Via a post on Emergent Village I came across this post at JesusManifesto.com. Kimberly Roth wonders why people are so taken by the plight of the people of Tibet and the work of the Dalai Lama and not equally enamored with the teachings of Christ:

There’s something about the plight of Tibetan Buddhists that tugs at the hearts and souls of people worldwide. The Dalai Lama is a highly regarded spiritual leader, the reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion come to serve the Tibetan people. He promotes peace, compassion, non-violence, tolerance and mutual respect, and he appears to live his life in this sphere. It is no wonder people are drawn to him, his religion, his politics and his people...

However, there is a flip-side to Tibetan Buddhism. There is work involved, and peace comes with a price. The Tibetan people serve multiple deities, some of whom are full of vengeance. Their religious practices are in part, to appease the deities en route to obtaining enlightenment. Monks create intricately detailed mandalas to house deities and guide meditation. Followers walk the streets of Tibet endlessly spinning prayer wheels in an effort to gain the attention of the Buddha of Compassion. Tibetans perform physical rituals, such as stopping to bow every few steps, in an effort to relieve personal suffering. Street children, widows and crippled men line the streets...

Tibetans are enslaved in a religion where deities are feared and atonement comes through repetitive actions. “Tibet is not free! Tibet is not free!” Followers of Christ, on the other hand, were set free through acceptance of his sacrificial atonement on our behalf and granted the gifts of grace and peace and hope. Tibetans strive for alleviation of suffering. Christians learn to rejoice in their sufferings, or so we are told...

Here’s where I get stuck.

Christians have been given the gift of true peace through a relationship with the Son of God. We do not have to do good works to earn our salvation, but through Christ’s sacrifice and the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are empowered to love other people with God’s love. When we fail to live up to the standard Christ demonstrated for our life, or when those around us mess up, there is still grace… grace that reminds us we are human… grace that reminds us we are loved… grace that picks us up, dusts us off, and encourages us to keep going. It truly is a wondrous faith.

Why, then, is it that the world is not enamored with faith in Christ?

Why is it that the world seems so taken by Tibetan Buddhism?

Why isn’t Christianity the religion of peace?

She begins to answer her own question about why the world seems so taken by Tibetan Buddhism with her follow-up question about why isn't Christianity the religion of peace? Could it be that the followers of Tibetan Buddhism are more Christ-like than many of the followers of Jesus? Could it be that the Dalai Lama, like Gandhi before him, embody the teachings of Jesus in their words and deeds - despite their different religious beliefs - more than most Christians? And if that is so, why should it be surprising that they, like Jesus in his time, attract followers and gain respect from people around the world?

I also am not sure I agree with Ms. Roth's understanding of the essence of Christianity as portrayed in this post. She says, "We do not have to do good works to earn our salvation, but through Christ’s sacrifice and the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are empowered to love other people with God’s love." I am assuming she is basing this statement on her reading of the writings of Apostle Paul. We are justified by faith not works.

But there is plenty of "works-righteousness" in Paul. Reads Romans 2. Or this:

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus (Phil. 3:12-14, NRSV).

Or this:

¹⁹For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them. ²⁰To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. ²¹To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law) so that I might win those outside the law. ²²To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. ²³I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings. ²⁴Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. ²⁵Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. ²⁶So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; ²⁷but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified. (1 Corinthians 9:19-27)

Justification by faith not works is absolutely central to Paul's argument that Gentiles have been invited to sit at the same table at God's big party where the Jew's were long ago chosen and privileged to be present. Gentiles do not have to become Jews first to be there. They only have to have faith in Jesus Christ, who paid the price of admission for them. This is Paul's argument.

But I do not think that Paul would then have said, "When we fail to live up to the standard Christ demonstrated for our life, or when those around us mess up, there is still grace… grace that reminds us we are human… grace that reminds us we are loved… grace that picks us up, dusts us off, and encourages us to keep going." I think he might have said instead that even though we are justified by faith, there is still a need to work out one's salvation with fear and trembling. There is plenty of work required to do on the way towards salvation for Paul.

And then there is that other guy, Jesus: "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." There is not a word about free grace in that simple definition of Christian discipleship.

So why is the world not enamored by faith in Christ? Because for too many Christians their religious expression - faith in Christ - is little more than a ticket to heaven. Say the words, get your ticket punched. Discipleship is defined as proper belief, faithful church attendance, prayer, and acts of charity. They misunderstand Paul and they ignore Jesus. There is still plenty of room within this definition of Christianity for living rich and gobbling up the world's resources while much of the world is poor, or for launching unprovoked wars that bring death and destruction to millions of people.

Meanwhile, real Christ-like discipleship is practiced by people like the Dalai Lama. It's not surprising to me at all why he and his faith expression inspires respect and emulation while much of what passes for Christianity today does not.

Virtue, Love, and Fortune and the U of MN Opera Theatre

On Sunday I had the pleasure to see/hear the recent U of MN Opera Theatre production of The Coronation of Poppea by Caludio Monteverdi. It is one of the earliest operas and the orchestra was small and the "heavy lifting" is done by the harpsichord and a few string instruments rather than a full orchestra.

Liberalchurch's music director, Andrew Fleser, played the harpsichord for the performance I attended. Here's what the program says about Andrew:

Andrew Fleser has performed as a soloist and accompainist throughout the U.S. and Europe. Fleser has worked with such musical luminaries as pianist Martin Katz, vocalists Sharon Sweet and Zehava Gal, and composers Ricky Ian Gordon, John Harbison, and Jake Heggie. He has served as a vocal coach on the faculty of Grand Valley State University (Allendale, MN), and at summer programs at Westminster Choir College or Rider University (Princeton, NJ) and Idaho State University.

Hailing originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Fleser received a Master's Degree in Piano Accompanying and Coaching from Westminster Choir College as a student of JJ Penna and Dalton Baldwin, and a Bachelor's Degree in Piano Performance from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids. Currently a doctoral candidate at the U. of MN, he studies Collaborative Piano with Timothy Lovelace.

_____________

Listening to Andrew play and reading the program was a great reminder at just how blessed we are at Open Circle to have him with us. Thanks Andrew!

A New Form of Political Protest

Between the U.S. primary election process and trying to stick within the Weight Watchers' regime, there are some days when I feel exactly same way as this guy in Naples, Italy--for entirely different reasons.

Question: Who am I paraphrasing Marie A. or Barak O.?
"Let them eat ballots!"

____________________________________

NAPLES (Reuters) - Ballot stuffing took on a new meaning in Italy's parliamentary election on Sunday when a man ate his ballot paper in protest at the country's politicians.

Police in Naples said they had charged the 41-year-old businessman with destroying election materials. He said all Italian politicians and politics "are crap" and that he was protesting "against the system."

(Reporting by Laura Viggiano; Writing by Phil Stewart)

Wright Stuff

GetReligion.org calls attention to an article in the Dallas Morning News about reaction from black preachers in the Dallas area to the "surprising" content of some of the sermons of Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's former pastor. Surprising, that is, to whites whose images of black preaching comes from iconic memories of Martin Luther King, Jr. preaching to the country during the civil rights struggles of the 60's. As I pointed out in a previous post Wright was echoing anger expressed by King himself in some of his own sermons.

And as the Dallas Morning News article points out, this venting of frustration by black American preachers from the pulpit is not unique:

The controversy is letting white America in on what was well-known to black Americans: A profound distrust of government and other institutions is preached in varying degrees from black pulpits – and shared by many in the pews...

"Our history in America says that we are not shocked by his statements," said the Rev. Frederick Haynes III, senior pastor at Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas.

Where does this distrust come from? From this kind of history, perhaps:

History fuels the distrust – particularly the infamous Tuskegee Experiment. For 40 years, beginning in 1932, nearly 400 black men with syphilis were enrolled in a health study to be treated for "bad blood." They were never told they had syphilis and were not treated for it because the doctors wanted to do autopsies on men who died with the disease.

The government only admitted what happened in 1972, after the Associated Press broke the story. The near-universal knowledge of that experiment among African-Americans grants credence to other health-related conspiracies.

"Certainly not in my lifetime will there ever be a sense of resolution and total trust in the medical system because of that," Dr. Reed said.

Meanwhile, racial inequities in health care continue to be documented. Just last month, a study of California's Medi-Cal managed care program identified significant differences in care for poor blacks, compared to poor people of other races.

"No matter how you slice it – in terms of the disease burden, outcomes, access to care – there is a disproportionate impact on communities of color, and particularly on the African-American community," Dr. Rawlings said.

Does this excuse vitriol coming from the pulpit? No. I think we who have the privilege of speaking on behalf of Jesus to our congregations are challenged to channel our anger at injustice into non-violent messages of compassion for our enemies and peaceful resistance to injustice. But I am also a very privileged white suburban American; I have never walked in the shoes of the oppressed, so I am loathe to cast stones at a preacher whose life experience is vastly difference than mine.

I am also somewhat amazed at the media attention Obama's pastor has drawn while candidates from the conservative end of the spectrum cast their lots with the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells and James Dobsons of our country who have been spewing vitriol for decades on our national airwaves at America and those they disagree with. Did we just expect more from our black preachers, or is there a double standard at work here?

Eating Dirt Cookies in Haiti

I was just watching a story on NBC News about people eating dirt cookies in Haiti. No link to the video is up on their website. But ABC News has the story:

It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud.

With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies.

Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau.

The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.

"When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day," Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.

Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies also give her stomach pains. "When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky too," she said.

The good we could be doing with the billions spent in Iraq. And I know we are dealing with a failed state, too. There is plenty of blame to go around.

Preachers of Hate

Via Andrew Sullivan I see that Foreign Policy has compiled a list of the world's most dangerous religious leaders. It includes a Muslim, Jew, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist. Every religion has its dangerous fanatics.

The Best Weatherman in the Twin Cities

Got fired. Greg Laden tells the story:

The story goes like this: Paul Douglas was a back-room meteorologist for a local Twin Cities news show. He was one of the guys in the back that actually predicted the weather, which was then delivered by the pretty boy/girl weathermen/women on camera. One day the main weatherman was out of town, and the other weatherman was sick (details of the story vary), and nobody realized that they had no one to report the weather until the very last second. So they threw Paul a jacket and tie and said "Get out there, boy, you're the weatherman today."

....

So Paul went in front of the camera and gave the weather, and charmed the audience and the reporters and the producers, and became, overnight, the best weatherman in television.

Paul went on to continue reporting the weather. He was always honest, accurate in his descriptions, and did the best job anyone could do given the vagaries of that business. Notably, Paul understood climate change and was one of the first TV weathermen to refuse to parrot the corporate global-warming denialism. Paul knew global warming was real.

In the meantime, Paul started up a weather data company that was very successful, and was eventually purchased by Garmin for over 40 million dollars, making him the "richest weatherman in the world" according to reports at that time.

I suspect Paul was very much in demand as a weatherman. He did go to Chicago for a while, but preferred living in the Twin Cities, so he returned. I imagine his salary was quite high. This may be why he was fired yesterday.

WCCO, the broadcast company that Paul worked for, has been laying off people, and plans to continue to do so, as they are being beaten out in the Twin Cities market by the local Fox News show. That is really a shame in so many ways... Yesterday, Paul Douglas was on the list of people to let go. Reports are that he is sad to have had this happen while he was on vacation, denying him the opportunity to say goodbye to his loyal audience. I imagine that was a corporate strategy to limit the public outcry over losing the best guy on local TV news (including all the reporters and weathermen/women).

I'm not worried about Paul. He is obviously not in need of a job. But his loss to local broadcasting is sad and palpable.

Greg omits one important fact about Douglas: he was a graduate of the best university in the country, Penn State. It was a classless act to fire him while he was on vacation. WCCO news was once the banner news station in the twin cities. But they are falling fast.

Objective Truth in Religion and it's Perils

On a listserve for progressive Brethren someone shared this post this morning:

I have been rereading Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach as a guiding focus as we do professional development for our principals next school year.

On the subject of how we perceive, he has some very interesting things to say. I will quote some of it here, and although it speaks of teaching, the words apply to far more.

"A mode of knowing arises from the way we answer two questions at the heart of the educational mission: how do we know what we know? and by what warrant can we call our knowledge true? Our answers may be largely tacit, even unconscious, but they are continually communicated in the way we teach and learn.A great post.

If we regard truth as something handed down from authorities on high, the classroom will look like a dictatorship. if we regard truth as a fiction determined by personal whim, the classroom will look like anarchy. if we regard truth as emerging from a complex process of mutual inquiry, the classroom will look like a resourceful and interdependent community. our assumptions about knowing can open up, or shut down, the capacity for connectedness on which good teaching depends. ...

For objectivism, any way of knowing that requires subjective involvement between the knower and the known is regarded as primitive, unreliable, and even dangerous. The intuitive is derided as irrational; true feeling is dismissed as sentimental; the imagination is seen as chaotic and unruly; and, storytelling is labeled as personal and pointless. ...

Years ago, Alfred North Whitehead declared that 'inert ideas' were the bane of higher education, deadening the process of teaching and learning for students and teachers alike. But for objectivism, the only good idea is an inert idea that like the lepidopterist's prize butterfly is not longer elusive and on the wing but has been chloroformed, pinned, boxed, and labeled. this way of knowing may render the world lifeless - but that, say its proponents, is a small price to pay for what they call objective truth. (pp. 50-52)"

"If we dare to move through our fear to practice knowing as a form of love, we might abandon our illusion of control and enter a partnership with the otherness of the world. By finding our place in the ecosystem of reality, we might see more clearly which actions are life-giving and which actions are not - and in the process, participate more fully in our own destinies, and the destiny of the world, than we do in our drive for control. This relational way of knowing - in which love takes away fear and co-creation replaces control - is a way of knowing that can help us reclaim the capacity for connectedness on which good teaching depends. (p. 56)"

What Palmer says about teaching is true in our complete lives as well. It is when we seek to define knowing for others (control) that we lose the more important call to relationship. In the Garden, God wanted relationship with Adam and Eve. God knew that once knowledge could be claimed, relationship was in jeopardy; therefore, the only prohibition was to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

How many do we see today who proclaim they *know* the truth of what is good and evil? How many relationships have been lost because of this objective truth?

A great post.

The Legacy of Dr. King

I missed this recent post by Taylor Branch in the New York Times about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Branch, the author of “At Canaan’s Edge,” the third volume in his history of the modern civil rights era, argues that King's legacy isn't just civil rights about non-violence:

Many of Dr. King’s closest comrades rejected his commitment to nonviolence. The civil rights movement created waves of history so long as it remained nonviolent, then stopped. Arguably, the most powerful tool for democratic reform was the first to become passé. It vanished among intellectuals, on campuses and in the streets. To this day, almost no one asks why.

We must reclaim the full range of blessings from his movement. For Dr. King, race was in most things, but defined nothing alone. His appeal was rooted in the larger context of nonviolence. His stated purpose was always to redeem the soul of America. He put one foot in the Constitution and the other in scripture. “We will win our freedom,” he said many times, “because the heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.” To see Dr. King and his colleagues as anything less than modern founders of democracy — even as racial healers and reconcilers — is to diminish them under the spell of myth.

...

Dr. King showed most profoundly that in an interdependent world, lasting power grows against the grain of violence, not with it. Both the cold war and South African apartheid ended to the strains of “We Shall Overcome,” defying all preparations for Armageddon. The civil rights movement remains a model for new democracy, sadly neglected in its own birthplace. In Iraq today, we are stuck on the Vietnam model instead. There is no more salient or neglected field of study than the relationship between power and violence.

We recoil from nonviolence at our peril. Dr. King rightly saw it at the heart of democracy. Our nation is a great cathedral of votes — votes not only for Congress and for president, but also votes on Supreme Court decisions and on countless juries. Votes govern the boards of great corporations and tiny charities alike. Visibly and invisibly, everything runs on votes. And every vote is nothing but a piece of nonviolence.

We pray in the name of Jesus and honor the memory of King, but we live by the the myth of redemptive violence. We sacrifice our sons and daughters in the name of peace. We think that we can bring democracy to Iraq by the barrel of a gun. Instead of being the world leader in exporting foreign aid, championing human rights, sending brigades of Peace Corps volunteers around the world, teaching the skills of peace-making and non-violence to our children... we export war and guns, violate human rights, and idolize trained killing machines.

An argument can be made that we need a military force to protect our country in a dangerous world, but the world would be a much less dangerous place if we did more than pay lip service to the legacy of Dr. King. What would the world look like if actually lived the teachings of Jesus and practiced the skills King taught us of non-violent resistance to injustice?

Mandaeans in Trouble

April DeConick here and here is highlighting the plight of one of the oldest religious communities in the world, the Mandaeans. They, like Christians and women and children, are another casualty of our great "success" in Iraq. Who are the Mandaeans?

The Sabian-Mandaean religion is one of the oldest monotheistic religions in the Middle East lived mainly in Southern Iraq and few in Iran. It is independent of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It follows the teachings of John the Baptist; baptism being its central ritual. The Mandaeans are around sixty thousand at the present time. During the past decade, and especially the past three years, thousands have escaped Iraq and Iran, choosing self-exile and escape rather than death and persecution. There is now a large refugee population in Syria (2100 families), Jordan, (500 families), Yemen (46 individuals) and smaller numbers in Lebanon, Egypt, Mali, and Thailand.

Some Days Are Like That

A no good very bad day.

We have a winter storm watch posted for tomorrow with the possibility of heavy snow. Ah... April in Minnesota. So today I decided to take my lawn mower to Ace Hardware for a spring tune up. On the way there it rolled backwards in the mini-van and hit and shattered the back windshield. It is going to be an expensive tune up.

Baby with Two Faces Worshipped as Goddess

From AP:

A baby with two faces was born in a northern Indian village, where she is doing well and is being worshipped as the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess, her father said Tuesday.

The baby, Lali, apparently has an extremely rare condition known as craniofacial duplication, where a single head has two faces. Except for her ears, all of Lali's facial features are duplicated -- she has two noses, two pairs of lips and two pairs of eyes.

"My daughter is fine -- like any other child," said Vinod Singh, 23, a poor farm worker.

Lali has caused a sensation in the dusty village of Saini Sunpura, 25 miles east of New Delhi. When she left the hospital, eight hours after a normal delivery on March 11, she was swarmed by villagers, said Sabir Ali, the director of Saifi Hospital.

"She drinks milk from her two mouths and opens and shuts all the four eyes at one time," Ali said.

Rural India is deeply superstitious and the little girl is being hailed as a return of the Hindu goddess of valor, Durga, a fiery deity traditionally depicted with three eyes and many arms.

Up to 100 people have been visiting Lali at her home every day to touch her feet out of respect, offer money and receive blessings, Singh told AP.

"Lali is God's gift to us," said Jaipal Singh, a member of the local village council. "She has brought fame to our village."

Village chief Daulat Ram said he planned to build a temple to Durga in the village.

"I am writing to the state government to provide money to build the temple and help the parents look after their daughter," Ram said.

Lali's condition is often linked to serious health complications, but the doctor said she was doing well.

"She is leading a normal life with no breathing difficulties," said Ali, adding that he saw no need for surgery.

Lali's parents were married in February 2007. Lali is their first child.

Singh said he took his daughter to a hospital in New Delhi where doctors suggested a CT scan to determine whether her internal organs were normal, but Singh said he felt it was unnecessary.

"I don't feel the need of that at this stage as my daughter is behaving like a normal child, posing no problems," he said.

I can't imagine what life is going to be like for this child.

Your Priest Stalker

From Reuters:

A Boston priest apologized in a New York court on Tuesday for stalking television host Conan O'Brien and his family and accepted an order to stay away from the comedian's home and office for two years.

The Rev. David Ajemian, 48, a priest in the Archdiocese of Boston, was arrested in November 2007 during a taping of NBC's "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" at New York City's Rockefeller Plaza.

Wearing khakis and a wrinkled overcoat, Ajemian said in court on Tuesday that from September 2006 until his arrest he sent letters, postcards and packages to O'Brien's New York home and to the NBC studio.

In one letter to the comedian, written on parish stationary, Ajemian referred to himself as "your priest stalker" and suggested he could be a guest on O'Brien's show.

When Should We Disobey Our Government?

Over on the blog of Craig Alan Myers, from the BRF (Brethren Revival Fellowship) which is the conservative wing of my denomination, Craig says:

THERE ARE only two times when the disciple of Jesus declines to obey human authorities: (1) If the government forbids him to do what the Bible plainly commands; (2) If the government commands him to do what the New Testament clearly forbids. Note the following examples which illustrate each situation:

(1) The Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) commands us to preach the Gospel to every person. If rulers forbid our doing what God clearly commands, we do it anyhow, like Peter and John did (Acts 4:13-20).

(2) Jesus prohibits the taking of human life and teaches us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:43-44). If rulers command us to take human life, we refuse to do it, like the early church did for three centuries after the time of Christ

The prevailing atmosphere in the New Testament is one of respect for those persons in the places of civil authority. Very seldom does it happen in a nation which is a republic that one is required to do what God’s Word clearly forbids. If we must ever disobey human government, it should be done with a spirit of humility and not in a spirit of defiance.

Is this really true? A couple of thoughts.

First, notice what Craig says is the only authority for deciding whether to obey or disobey civil authorities: the Bible. God doesn't speak in any other way? To one's conscience, for example?

Second, Craig says that "the prevailing atmosphere in the New Testament is one of respect for those persons in places of civil authority." Is this true for Jesus? I don't think so. Take for example this teaching of Jesus from Matthew 5:41:

⁴¹and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.

In the passage from the Sermon on the Mount Jesus is addressing one of the much resented reminders of the Roman occupation of Palestine: soldiers forcing civilians to carry their packs on military marches. What is Jesus saying here? Kill them with kindness? Ingratiate oneself with the enemy to stay out of trouble?

This example clearly does not meet Craig's threshold for resistance to civil authorities. It is not about preaching the gospel or killing another person. Jesus is addressing a humiliating and unjust act sanctioned by the goverment. What is his instruction?

Here is what Walter Wink has to say about Jesus' instructions in his classic, Engaging the Powers:

Jesus does not encourage Jews to walk a second mile in order to build up merit in heaven, or to exercise a supererogatory piety, or to kill the soldier with kindness. He is helping an oppressed people find a way to protest and neutralize an onerous practice despised throughout the empire. He is not giving a non-political message of spiritual world-transcendence. he is formulating a worldly spirituality in which the people at the bottom of society or under the thumb of imperial power learn to recover their humanity. (p. 182)

Jesus is teaching a strategy of non-violent resistance to unjust actions sanctioned by civil authorities. A practice Jesus himself employed in the passion story: riding the donkey into Jerusalem making messianic claims about himself in the midst of a highly charged Passover atmosphere, overturning the tables of the money-changers in the temple, refusing to answer the questions of Pilate, etc. Each of these actions is an example of non-violent resistance to civil authorities. (I suppose we can debate whether over-turning tables in the temple is non-violent.)

Our (Craig and me) Church of the Brethren ancestors misread these passages and others as examples of non-resistance to evil. They did not know what we know now about the sitz im leben, the setting in life, of these passages. They did know all too well about oppression against the anabaptist movement. But what they took from the scriptures was a lesson on non-violent (right) non-resistance (wrong) to the injustices perpetrated by government in the name of keeping the peace.

It is certainly true in theory that, as Craig says, because we live in a republic there ought to be rare moments when we need to resist civil authorities. But the practical history of the long struggle for civil rights in our country, as well as the recent history in my life-time of political leaders taking us into two wars on false pretenses and of having a current administration willing to sanction illegal wiretapping and torture of prisoners suggests otherwise. And my reading of the teachings and practice of Jesus tells me that when our government acts in unjust ways and we are unable to remedy the situation through the ballot box then we are called to non-violent resistance to this injustice. Just like Jesus did.

Kansas Wins

That's my prediction for tonight. I picked them to win it all from the very beginning. I did not pick Memphis to be in the final.

Update: Amen!

Governor Nixes Central Corridor Light Rail Money

Like our President, Minnesota's governor has largely become irrelevant to the function of government except for the damage he can do as his term winds down. The Governor's short-sighted no-new taxes policies were soundly rejected during the last election when Democrats were swept into office to do something about our crumbling infrastructure, underfunded schools, and an economy that is declining more rapidly here than in the rest of the country. Republicans and Democrats overrode the Governor's recent veto of a transportation funding bill that even the Chamber of Commerce said we needed.

So it was payback time. The legislature passed a bonding bill that exceeded the governor's "threshold" of what was fiscally acceptable. What that means that there were too many projects in Democrat districts and not enough in Republican districts. (Up to this point the Governor has had no problem with funding everything through bonding in order to avoid raising state taxes.) The Governor could have vetoed the whole bill and forced legislators back to the table but there was no way he was going to get more of what he wanted. So he used his line item veto to ax spending projects. Most notable was his veto of money for the central corridor light rail line that he supposedly supports. Here is Minnesota2020's take:

By slashing $70 million, the Governor has wrecked nearly half a billion dollars in federal funding. Without the federal money light rail will not happen.

This is the kind of project that is both environmentally responsible and crucial to the competitive fortunes of the twin cities. So naturally the Governor kills it.

What is Progressive Christianity

Via James McGrath I discovered the blog of Gretta Vospera, and this post on the continual redefinition of what is progressive Christianity. What it is, she says, depends on where the Christian community is starting. Progressive Christianity can refer to becoming more welcoming, re-thinking liturgy and worship, focusing on justice issues, re-imagining God, and more:

But the very nature of progressive thought is that it keeps moving on. And so it has. Churches that struggled through the gender-inclusive language debate in the 1980s and 1990s now turn their attention to the beingness of God and challenge the theistically-exclusive language that has been formerly privileged. Those that contextualized the Bible’s message, now struggle through the idea that it is not only not divinely inspired but that it is potentially dangerous when held up as a moral or ethical authority and should be demoted as a spiritual foundation. Those that have changed the names of God to ones that are less dominated by the traditional pictures the word “God” evokes are now faced with scientific and archaeological findings that challenge the idea of God as creator; philosophical ideas that undermine the ultimate reality of God as a being separate and distinct from human experience; anthropological examination that exposes the human need to create deities and supernatural forces. They struggle to reflect new understandings within their worship and congregational life, honouring the old ideas they set aside even as they embrace interpretations, new understandings, and new experiences.

So it is that the definition of progressive Christianity is a difficult one to make. Any community that pulls itself outside of its own worldview to question its purpose, its practice, its foundations, and its beliefs will be challenged by what it finds. Working through the reality of that challenge will eventually cause it to reject one thing (or many things) in exchange for something else. Whether it be an understanding of what is just, a belief in a theistic God, or a way of creating a welcoming environment, the communities that employ the elements of progressive thinking, openness, creativity, passion, intellectual rigour, honesty, courage, balance and respect, will see themselves progress along that endless continuum of what Christianity can be.

Progressive Christianity cannot be nailed down to one thing. It lives in flux. It always will because that is its nature. It always will because it must.

Very nice post.

Another Round on the Talpiot Tomb

James Tabor continues to champion the assertion that the Talpiot Tomb could be the tomb of Jesus. He comments today on a recently published statistical analysis of the likelihood the tomb could be the real deal:

At long last, just over a year after the initial publicity over the Talpiot “Jesus Family Tomb,” the formal paper of Prof. Andrey Feuerverger of the University of Toronto has appeared in The Annals of Applied Statistics, the academic journal of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (Vol. 2, no. 1, March, 2008). Feuerverger’s paper, titled “Statistical Analysis of an Archaeological Find,” runs just over 50 pages with notes and bibliography. It is introduced by editor Stephen E. Fienberg and followed by another 50 pages of material from ten professional respondents. Feuerverger then offers a dozen page Rejoinder. Fortunately, for those not near a research library the entire issue, devoted to this subject, is available on the Web through Project Euclid.

This article should put to rest the many spurious claims that Feuerverger subsequently recanted his views on the probabilities of the Talpiot Tomb belonging to Jesus of Nazareth and his family, most recently repeated by Thomas Madden on the National Review Web site over Easter. It will also show the complete inaccuracy of the assertion made by a number of scholars following the January Princeton Seminar conference in Jerusalem that “A statistical analysis of the relatively common names engraved on the ossuaries leaves no doubt that the probability of the Talpiot tomb belonging to Jesus’ family is virtually nil if the Mariamene named on one of the ossuaries is not Mary Magdalene.”

...

Based on the calculations of Elliot and Kilty, whose paper can be downloaded from the Web, and as discussed by Camil Fuchs, who along with Andrey Feuerverger, sat on the panel at the Jerusalem conference dealing with statistics, the name cluster, even leaving Mariamene out entirely, with no assumptions regarding Mary Magdalene, show a probability factor of .48. This result is far from “virtually nil,” in fact it is very close to 1/2, meaning if we had two tombs to examine, one of them would be the Jesus tomb. Both Ingermanson and Fuchs are among the respondents to the published Feuerverger paper.

It now appears, with Feuerverger’s paper in print, that we have finally reached the point where a more responsible and accurate discussion of the Talpiot tomb name frequencies and statistics can take place. We can at least say that anyone who asserts “the names are common,” as a way of dismissing the evidence, is either completely ignorant of what we now know, or uninterested in an informed and truly academic discussion.

I look forward to reading the replies.

The Politics of Proselytization

A good post over on the Christianity Today blog about proselytization from an evangelical perspective. Read both the Mouw and Guthrie pieces linked to get a sense of the variety of thinking about proselytizing among evangelicals.

I am one of those (I think) rare liberal Christians who believes strongly in evangelism. I think, as I said in my message today, that Jesus has something important to share with the world. There are people who are looking for what Jesus has to say; there are people looking for what Christian communities have to offer. I don't really understand the fear among liberals about evangelism. If we don't think our understanding of Jesus is worth sharing then what is good about the good news.

On the other hand I have no interest in trying to convert those who are convicted adherents to other religious expressions, be they Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, or Atheist (and yes, Atheism is a faith expression). If people have found a spiritual path that works for them then that is o.k. with me. I am comfortable sharing with them my convictions and listening to them do the same.

But there are people who are looking for the Jesus I know. Some of them were once conservative Christians who can no longer believe the things they once believed about Jesus. Some are coming from no faith tradition but are looking for a spiritual community. Some are weary of the culture wars or the political wars and are looking for a way of peace, both inner and outer. I am more than happy to share with them what I know about Jesus. I am more than happy to help them find a non-threatening space where they can listen, learn, share, and figure things out for themselves.

I also think that one of the very best things about my anabaptist and COB heritage is the belief that the very best form of evangelism is service and the way we live our lives. If we concentrate on serving others and living our lives in a manner consistent with the way of Jesus, our lives will speak. Some will ask why it is we do what we do. Then we can talk about Jesus. There is absolutely no need to be spending time or money on foreign mission to convert the "heathen" Muslims or anyone else. It does far more harm than good.

About all of this I have very strong convictions. One of the weary mis-truths spouted by some conservatives is that liberals are "anything goes" people. It isn't true of any of the liberal Christians I know. It is true, however, that we often haven't done a very good job of thinking about why we might want to share our strong convictions in a way that is both respectful and engaging.

MLK Jr. and the Candidates

I am sitting here watching the PBS Newshour, and have just watched the clips of speeches by John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, each marking the 40 year anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis.

Hillary is the clear loser on message. I will never vote for John McCain because he is running on a continuation of the failed policies of Bush. But it is easy to see why people admire McCain and why the mainstream media gushes over him. He stood on the balcony in Memphis where MLK was killed 40 years ago today and admitted he was wrong about opposing a King holiday. There were audible boos, but he was there willing to say what he needed to say.

Obama was, I believe, in Indiana today where he marked the anniversary of King's death by speaking extemporaneously about the personal discipline of the non-violence movement. As usual he was comfortable, engaging, and his message was trans-partisan: the personal discipline required to move forward a social justice movement.

Hillary was in Memphis, and to be fair they only showed a clip, but she was woodenly reading from a script and the emotion seemed contrived. In the clip she talked about the need for others to pick up the ball and keep the message of King alive. True enough. But weak, weak, weak.

Friday with Sampson & Sadie

It's been awhile since I posted cat pictures. I have been meaning to post this series for a couple of weeks. Sampson, our big guy, is half Maine Coon. Maine Coons are typically vertically challenged, and Sampson definitely fits that description. But a couple of weeks ago while I was sitting in my office reading, Sampson decided he wanted to keep company with my copy of Bauer's Greek-English Lexicon of the NT. So he made the leap and was very proud of himself. And then Sadie decided to join him. She never has any trouble with heights and frequently checks out this corner. Last fall she sat on my desk one day with her tail madly twitching and then jumped straight into the corner and turned around holding a mouse in her mouth. In any case, Sampson wasn't too happy about the company. He watched, wouldn't move over, and then pushed her off.

The Bible and Me

My newsletter article this week:

Over the last couple of months I have immersed myself in a fresh reading of scripture texts, both from the Bible and from non-canonical sources like the Gospels of Thomas and Mary. I have also been re-reading some scholarly commentaries, all in preparation for my pre- and post- Easter messages on the communities of Jesus.

I always enjoy this reading, and I enjoy sharing what I know (and don't know) with both the Bible study group on Wednesdays and the congregation on Sundays. I think it is important for us to have a good knowledge of these scriptures. They form the core of our both our Christian and our Western heritage.

But I come away from these readings realizing once again why I am a progressive Christian. I am a Christian, first, because I was raised in a Christian environment and immersed from childhood on in the stories of Jesus. As an adult I have come to appreciate and chosen to appropriate the way of Jesus as my way. Jesus as I understand him is the guiding force in my faith expression. Although, I have also come to learn, appreciate, and appropriate teachings from other religious traditions as well.

This helps identify me , I suppose, as a progressive or liberal Christian. I do not think there is only one "true" spiritual path.

But getting back to the reading of Christian scriptures, I come away realizing once again that I do not share the worldview of the writers of the scriptures, or even of Jesus. They lived in a world where demons and spirits were a part of everyday reality. People could die and be raised from death. Emperors and saviors could be born to virgin mothers; no human father required. God could and did intervene in history to bring floods, miraculous healings, devastating destruction.

I am completely comfortable understanding that this was part of their worldview. Just as I am completely comfortable understanding that when they talked about sexuality they had no understanding of sexual orientation as we understand it today. The bible reflects this very different worldview through and through. I don't feel the need to apologize for it or try to explain it away.

But it is not a worldview that I share. I am at home in this modern or post-modern world that I have been raised in. I accept the scientific worldview as I understand it with regards to evolution, the scientific and historic methods of inquiry, the marvels of modern medicine, and the de-mythologizing of our world. (There is no devil making people do bad things or God who is going to bring a firestorm down on San Francisco.) My world is non-magical, but still plenty enchanted with mystery and wonder and beauty.

For this reason the Bible is not the last word for me on truth or life or even God. It is the first word. It is where I begin because it helps me understand my spiritual heritage. It also chronicles for me some of the great leap-forwards in spiritual insights in the history of humanity - in the works of the prophets for instance - and it gives us the life-testimony and teachings of Jesus, one of the most authentic spiritual leaders in history. The Bible also offers profound insights into the human condition (something that hasn't changed much in thousands of years), and plenty of stories as examples of the very best and worst of it on display.

But knowledge about our world and the way we think about God continues to unfold. Revelation is progressive. As we evolve individually and as a human community, the horizon continues to unfold before us. For this reason we will never be able to know all there is to know, another pre-modern notion. The more we know the more we realize how little we know. There is no way in the world Moses or Jesus or Paul or the biblical writers could have spoken the (God's) last word from their point in history and their worldview on events unfolding thousands of years later. As the UCC likes to say: God is still speaking.

So I thoroughly enjoy reading, studying and learning about, the Bible. It is always where I begin thinking about my spiritual journey. It is where I return again and again for reflection and touching base. But it may not always be where I end up. I am a progressive Christian.

The Gospel According to Pagels

Bruce Chilton is a well-known biblical scholar who has written an interesting article about Elaine Pagels for The New York Sun. Pagels was one of the lead translators for the Nag Hammadi collection and has become an authority and popular author in all matters gnostic.

Chilton gives Pagels her due as a scholar but also takes issue with some of her conclusions about gnosticism. For one thing he thinks she overstates the case that the emerging Christian orthodoxy was in an asymmetrical power situation with regards to the gnostic movement, and that this contributed to orthodoxy's eventual "victory":

Because successive emperors promoted or permitted the persecution of "atheists" — people such as Christians who refused to acknowledge the gods of Rome and the divinity of the emperor — both Catholics and Gnostics were martyred, paying for their convictions with torture and even death. Although the great majority from both sides managed to find an accommodation with their Roman masters, enough of them refused to bend to the will of their persecutors that Catholics and Gnostics alike had to contend with the question of how much their adherents should put themselves in harm's way for their beliefs.

Under the circumstances of Roman rule, it is unconvincing, misleading, and inaccurate to portray Catholics as somehow exercising power over Gnostics in the period prior to the fourth century. After Constantine's conversion, of course, Rome's might did back Catholic Christianity in military and financial, as well as political, terms. But it is anachronistic to describe the two groups' relationship prior to that as a power inequality. Both of them were oppressed. They did argue with one another, and amongst themselves; that was the nature of theological debate in earliest Christianity, and in the ancient Mediterranean world as a whole. Moreover, the lines of demarcation and debate were fluid: Many Catholics claimed access to true gnosis, while Gnostics claimed their truth was universal. In fact, "Catholic" and "Gnostic," though convenient terms for grouping differing communities in retrospect, did not at the time represent mutually exclusive orientations, as Ms. Pagels herself admits.

He also thinks Pagels often looks at gnosticism with glasses tinted by her own liberal agenda:

Ms. Pagels is too wise to pretend that the Gnosticism of the historical sources supports the Neo-Gnostic fashions of our time that have thrived in New Age circles. Yet in "The Gnostic Gospels," she does compare the texts to what existentialists, feminists, and environmentalists have to say. Her habit might be seen as part of the historian's function, to use today's language to help explain yesterday's events and movements. But by impact if not by intent, her book has promoted the view that Gnosticism is a liberal version of Christianity, when in fact liberalism and Gnosticism are radically different phenomena.

By softening the hard edges of the texts she herself had a hand in translating, Ms. Pagels has robbed many of her readers of an appreciation of the real force of the Gnostic Gospels. The fact is that Gnosticism, even after Constantine, was not successfully repressed. Many of its books were indeed destroyed or hidden away; it seems plausible that the Nag Hammadi library was sealed in a jar and buried to protect the writings from overzealous orthodox monks during the fourth century. But even as the books went underground, the power of gnosis remained.

And, Chilton argues, remains to this day. Gnosticism is alive and well not only among some liberal Christians who, like me, find some parts of it attractive but also among fundamentalist Christians where a form of gnostic thinking thrives:

Fundamentalism is fiercely attached to the ultimately Gnostic doctrine that God paid Satan by permitting his son to die.

Pagels is still one of the best sources for knowledge about gnosticism, and she has helped open the door to understanding the great diversity of the early Christian period, but she too succombs to the temptation I called attention to a few days ago.

Pat Robertson Article

The Virginia Quarterly Review has a fascinating article by Bill Sizemore about Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, one-time Presidential candidate, charismatic Christian, and proponent of the prosperity (pseudo) gospel. A few highlights:

Over forty-six years of electronic ministry, this icon of evangelicalism has done a lot of praying, and he says it has paid a multitude of dividends. He declares with utmost confidence that God speaks to and through him, has diverted hurricanes at his urging, and has healed thousands of the sick and lame in answer to his pleas. He claims to have had personal encounters with Satan and the demons at his command, and in January 2007 he told his national audience that God had personally warned him of a major terrorist attack, “perhaps nuclear,” that would occur before year’s end. Given this track record, it would be easy to dismiss Robertson as a caricature. But that would be a mistake.

Since Jerry Falwell’s death, Robertson is the most visible evangelical leader in America. A recent public opinion survey conducted by Christian pollsters the Barna Group found that Robertson was the only religious figure besides Billy Graham—who has retired from preaching—known to at least half the population. Perhaps of most import for the nation and the world, he has pioneered a unique marriage between theology and politics. This is a man who ran for president because, he said, God told him to, but that brief campaign twenty years ago would be merely a footnote in American political history were it not for the potent legacy it spawned...

Robertson was the son of a Senator who became a Marine who went to law school but failed the bar who became a businessman until he had a conversion experience and decided God wanted him in the business of broadcasting. He bought a bankrupt TV station in Portsmouth, Virginia:

Worst of all, in September 1961 just as Robertson’s fledgling TV station was preparing for its first broadcast, Hampton Roads was threatened with devastation by Hurricane Esther, a category-4 storm pushing northwest across the Atlantic. Nearly 15,000 residents were evacuated from the Norfolk area, where the National Weather Service predicted the hurricane would make landfall, but Robertson refused to leave. From a ballroom at the top of the Monticello Hotel in downtown Norfolk, he prayed that God would divert the hurricane and spare the station. The storm slowed and turned northward, skirting the Virginia coast and eventually making landfall on Nantucket Island and the coast of Maine. Robertson claimed credit for the miracle—and now says he has prayed away several other hurricanes from Hampton Roads in the years since. “For the past 45 years or so,” he wrote in Miracles Can Be Yours Today, published in 2006, “God has set an invisible shield around our area.”

On October 1, 1961, just days after the storm had passed, Robertson’s WYAH—as in “Yahweh”—went on the air, with the evangelist praying in front of a cardboard cross. Such humble beginnings notwithstanding, God wanted only the best for WYAH, which would expand into the goliath Christian Broadcast Network. Robertson wrote that the Almighty had told him, “Pat, I want you to have an RCA transmitter”—the most expensive FM transmitter then on the market at $19,000. In the beginning, pricey and divine demands like these strained Robertson’s budget to the breaking point. Expenses continued to skyrocket, and the future of the station seemed constantly imperiled. In 1962, Robertson came up with a solution for his financial woes by holding a telethon. The goal was to find 700 viewers who were willing to each pledge $10 a month, enough to cover the station’s expenses. Robertson dubbed this group The 700 Club.

The story chronicles the rise and fall of Jim Bakker, who along with his then wife Tammy helped make the CBN profitable. It also talks to Gerard Thomas Straub, the one-time successful soap opera producer who became an associate of Robertson's and helped turn CBN into a successful and professional machine, until he too had a fall-out with Robertson:

At the show, he advanced quickly, soon becoming a 700 Club producer and a Robertson confidant. The two men developed what Straub later described as almost a father–son relationship. “But it didn’t take long to discover that their faith was different from mine,” Straub told me. He grew particularly uncomfortable with Robertson’s claims of miracle cures for everything from acne, goiter, and varicose veins to arthritis, diabetes, and brain tumors. To this day, Robertson holds hands with his co-host, scrunches his eyes shut, and delivers “words of knowledge” to his viewers—accounts of people being healed as they watch the show. Even “a little shaggy dog” was being healed, he announced on one show in 2006.

“Not a soul in the place ever questioned what was happening,” Straub wrote later in his book Salvation for Sale. “I just assumed that someday I would understand. I was wrong.” Most people felt that everything was justified by Robertson’s apocalyptic theology. From the beginning of his ministry, Robertson has made plain that he expects to live to see the Second Coming of Jesus, and he is preparing for Christ’s final battle with the Antichrist, a demon-possessed man who will have ruled as a worldwide dictator for at least three and a half years. Robertson says lust, homosexuality, drunkenness, gluttony, and witchcraft can be expressions of demonic activity and believes that Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx were demon-possessed. At various times during the 1970s, he warned that Ouija boards, visits to fortune-tellers, and playing Dungeons and Dragons were potential sources of demonic possession. “It was dark, ominous,” Straub told me. “They saw evil everywhere.” And Robertson emphasizes that he does not regard such evil as mere metaphor for human failings. He believes, for example, that a wave of depression that he once experienced in a motel near Seattle was much more than self-doubt. “I realized I was under demonic attack,” he wrote. “I immediately took control over it and said, ‘Satan, in the name of Jesus, I cast you forth.’ The minute I said that, my mind was free and my despair was gone.”

Equally important to Robertson’s vision of the end-time is the nation of Israel. He sees Israel’s establishment in 1948 as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy—an event that set the clock ticking toward the creation of Christ’s kingdom—and took it as a sign from God that Israel’s Six-Day War began on the same day in 1967 that CBN broke ground on its new headquarters in Portsmouth. “In my thinking, the ministry of CBN was an end-times ministry,” he wrote. “Like John the Baptist, we had been called to proclaim the end of the old age and to prepare the people for the coming of Jesus Christ and the new age.” For Robertson the pact was sealed at a dedication ceremony for the new building when his old friend Harald Bredesen channeled God in a “word of prophecy,” intoning into the mike: “I have chosen you to usher in the coming of my Son.”

In order to prepare for the imminent Second Coming—which Robertson believes will occur on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem according to biblical prophecy—he acquired METV (Middle East Television), a station then based in southern Lebanon that could broadcast into Israel. Straub was given marching orders to be ready to televise Christ’s return. CBN executives drew up a detailed plan to broadcast the event to every nation and in all languages. Straub wrote: “We even discussed how Jesus’ radiance might be too bright for the cameras and how we would have to make adjustments for that problem. Can you imagine telling Jesus, ‘Hey, Lord, please tone down your luminosity; we’re having a problem with contrast. You’re causing the picture to flare.’”

There is much more - just as frightening and troubling - about his questionable charitable operations, his politics, and his opening of a "law school" that eventually became a feeder for George Bush's Justice Department and Administration. It is, as I said, a fascinating story of one man who has given Christianity a very bad name.

3/30/08 Message

I was hoping to post the audio of the message on the web but the quality on the audio was not good this week so here are the notes:

The beginning of a multi-week series on the communities of Jesus after Easter, including James, Paul, Mark, Thomas, Mary, and John.

I want to begin today by making the seemingly obvious observation that Jesus had brothers and sisters. It's seemingly obvious because the Gospel of Mark tells us that he did, and names the brothers: James, Josie's, Judas, and Simon. The sisters are not named. In early Christian history this wasn't a problem. Most of the early Christian writings before the fourth century took for granted that the brothers and sisters of Jesus with a natural born children of Joseph and Mary. But by the late fourth century, as the theology of Mary's perpetual virginity develops, siblings become a problem. In the Western tradition, the Roman Catholic tradition, the brothers become cousins. In Eastern tradition, the Orthodox tradition the brothers were sons of Joseph but by a previous marriage, and thus had no blood ties to Jesus or his mother.

All of that is a subject for another discussion sometime. I want to talk about today is the role of James, the brother of Jesus who plays a prominent role in the early Jesus movement, but whose role is greatly eclipsed by Peter and Paul as the tradition and develops.

We learned of the prominent role played by James from Paul, who names him as one of the pillars of the Jerusalem church. In fact it might be fair to infer from Paul that James was more prominent in Jerusalem then Peter. Here's what he has to say in Galatians about Peter and James, and he's not very happy with either of them:

Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. 2I went up in response to a revelation. Then I laid before them (though only in a private meeting with the acknowledged leaders) the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, in order to make sure that I was not running, or had not run, in vain. 3But even Titus, who was with me, was not compelled to be circumcised, though he was a Greek. 4But because of false believers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might enslave us— 5we did not submit to them even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might always remain with you. 6And from those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders (what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality) —those leaders contributed nothing to me. 7On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel for the circumcised 8(for he who worked through Peter making him an apostle to the circumcised also worked through me in sending me to the Gentiles), 9and when James and Cephas and John, who were acknowledged pillars, recognized the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. 10They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do.
11But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; 12for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. 13And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. 14But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” 15We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; 16yet we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.

So basically what Paul is saying here is that he thought he had an agreement with James and Peter and John. That agreement allow him to talk about Jesus with Gentiles, and Peter has the mission to the Jews. And the agreement is that the Gentiles would not have to observe the key Jewish boundary markers -- follow Jewish dietary restrictions or be circumcised -- to be part of the Jesus movement. It is enough for them to accept Jesus as savior. That agreement, he thinks, is being broken. And, according to Paul, when Peter visits Paul he doesn’t' act very Jewish. He eats with the Gentiles... until a group sent by James visits and forces Peter to separate himself from the Gentiles. So James clearly is an authority in the Jerusalem church.

This is confirmed in several other early Christian sources. In the Gospel of Thomas we read:

12 The disciples said to Jesus, "We know that you are going to leave us. Who will be our leader?" Jesus said to them, "No matter where you are you are to go to James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being."

It is also confirmed by Clement of Alexandria, who wrote in the late second century: "Peter and James and John after the ascension of the Savior did not struggle for glory, because they had previously been given honor by the Savior, but chose James just as overseer of Jerusalem."

But we don't know very much about James beyond this. The only other historical fact we have comes from the Jewish historian Josephus, who writes that in 62 the Sanhedrin, the priestly leadership in the temple moved against James and has him stoned to death. So for 30 years James, the brother of Jesus is in Jerusalem as the primary leader of the Jesus movement. And interestingly, when he is killed tradition has it that one of the other brothers of Jesus, Simon, or Simeon, is named as the head of the church. It is the Jesus family dynasty, that gets lost in Christian history.

But James is important because he gives us a window into one branch of the early Jesus movement. What seems likely is that James was the acknowledged leader of a group of Jesus' followers, all Jews, who believed that Jesus had been anointed by God as the Jewish Messiah whose presence would usher in God's kingdom on earth. Sometime after the death of Jesus they took up residence in Jerusalem; they went to the temple regularly and lived as observant Jews, and looked forward to the return of Jesus and the ushering in of God's kingdom.

They probably found themselves in an uncomfortable situation. On the one hand their fellow Jews were not buying their belief that Jesus was the Messiah. The death of James at the hands of Jewish leadership is evidence of their troubled situation there. And on the other hand Paul's writings suggest that they also had trouble with the direction the movement was going under his leadership. The Jesus movement is taking off in a direction that, they believed, would have been unrecognizable to Jesus himself.

In the NT, Paul's legacy, though corrected by Acts and some of the letters attributed to Paul, overshadows the legacy of James and Jewish Christians. Which is not surprising since the movement eventually becomes a Gentile movement.

But the influence of James and Jewish Christianity is there in the NT. In the Gospel of Matthew, considered the most Jewish of Gospels. In Matthew 5:17-20 Jesus says:

17“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. 18For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. 19Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

And in the book of James, attributed to James the brother of Jesus but written long after he was dead. Nevertheless James gives us evidence of push-back against Paul's teachings on grace:

14What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? 15If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, 16and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? 17So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. 18But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.

Although the Jerusalem church died out in the aftermath of the Jewish war the destruction of the temple, Jewish Christianity did not die out completely. A group known as the Ebionites existed for 4 centuries in and around Palestine. The Ebionites were Jewish Christians who believed that Jesus was the Jewish messiah. They used a form of the gospel of Matthew as their gospel. It did not have the beginning of the gospel with the story of the virgin birth. They rejected the virgin birth story of Jesus' conception, but believed that Jesus was born to Joseph and Mary and was anointed by God as an adult to be the messiah. They lived as observant Jews. They revered James as the founder of their movement. They were named as heretics by orthodox Christian writers.

I want to say a word about the continuing influence of this way of thinking about Jesus and faith in the Christian story, an influence that lives on because we have Matthew and James in our NT bibles. Because of the over-riding influence of Paul's writings and the Gospel of John's take on Jesus - both of which I am going to address in weeks ahead -a heavy emphasis gets placed on focusing on our relationship with Jesus as the son of God. In contrast, Matthew and James point to what Paul called the works approach to faith, an approach he didn't like. But it is no accident that in the Anabaptist tradition of Mennonites and Brethren that Matthew and James have always been favorite books. Matthew has the Sermon on the Mount (blessed are poor, merciful, peacemakers); James says be doers of the word. This tradition, our tradition, cared relatively less about having a right relationship with Jesus and more about doing what he did. This has been one of my mantra's here forever: I don't worry too much about what a person says about their belief in Jesus. It is what we do that matters. When we are living as peacemakers, living simply, caring for those less fortunate, we are doing what Jesus did. That way of thinking and doing is part of the legacy of James.

Congratulations to "Speaking of Faith"!

I just read that the Public Radio program "Speaking of Faith" which originates from the Twin Cities station has won a Peabody Award for their program on Rumi. Congratulations to Krista Tippett and the SOF Staff!

April: Good Month? Bad Month?

Today my grandfather, Elmo Macin Estill, would be 110 if he was still living. The first house he owned is where my mother -- the wife of his only child -- now lives. Grandpa Elmo and his wife Nellie purchased their home after the person who was having it built suffered financial setbacks during the depression in the '30s and committed suicide (not on the grounds).

I have other friends who have had family members who have committed suicide. I have even intervened with a friend who was verbalizing suicide plans. Just yesterday my friends and I were talking about suicide at our crafting group--so it is on our collective minds as a rememberance of a past tragic loss of someone we have known or as our own cry for help.

This morning on Beliefnet's Beyond Blue is a very important article that people should read on the signs/liklihood of suicide.

This time of year the world is filled with the hope of spring. Those who are suffering from depression feel lost and are most vulnerable right now. Please be aware of those around us who may need our help! This is definately a 'life and death' time of year. Do your part to affirm and/or save a life!

More from Pastor Anderson

Pastor Anderson is the preacher from the previous post. It was funny. But not all of his sermon material is so amusing. From Loren Rosson's blog here is a portion of Anderson's sermon on Romans 11:

"Okay, so God gets to a point sometimes where he says, 'I'm through with you.' Now I'm going to tell you something. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. And when I preached that sermon on Sunday night [about the Farmington gay community], I mean those facts that I was reading for you, I didn't even know that information until I studied for that sermon. See, I live in a bubble. See, Pastor Anderson lives in a little bubble [laughter], because Pastor Anderson doesn't watch TV, so he's not really exposed to everything that's going on out in the world. Okay? So I just live in my own little happy land, where I don't really know what's going on about certain things. You know I try to know what's going on.

"You know, I had no clue that gays were allowed to adopt children in America? Until like a few months ago? You know, I didn't even know that? I mean, I thought that would surely be illegal. Surely we haven't come to that point. And then I was as shocked when I found out they had been doing it for years. I think it's been going on for what, five years or something. I didn't even know about it, I didn't even know it was going on. I couldn't even believe that we were to that point yet. And then I read that statistic on Sunday night where six million -- in excess of six million children -- are living with at least one gay parent right now in America. Six million. And now only one state in America has a law against it: Florida; the law goes back to 1977, it's probably going to change.

"And I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to tell you something. I told somebody -- and I'm going to stand by my word on this -- I told somebody four years ago, I said, 'If it ever gets to the point where the gays are adopting children in this country --' And you know what, you go ahead and stand in judgment of me, go ahead and think whatever you want about Pastor Anderson. You go ahead, you go right ahead. Because I stand before God, that's my master, that's who I answer to, not you. But I think it was about four years ago, I used to spend on Saturdays, I used to spend one hour every Saturday, and I'd go down in the basement of my house for one hour on Saturdays and I would pray for America. And I'd spend one hour a day -- I'm sorry, one hour on Saturdays that is -- and one hour I would spend just praying that God would bless America. Praying that God would bless America and turn this thing around and bring a revival and bring righteousness and save America, bless America -- 'Oh God, would you bless us and help us, our country's in bad shape'. But I'm going to tell you something. I told my friend at the time, Brother Reggie, a good friend of mine, he's still a good friend of mine, I told him, I said, 'If it ever gets to the point where the gays are adopting children in this country, I will never pray for America again.'

"You go ahead and judge me all you want. I said, 'I'll never pray for America again.' I said, 'You know what I'll pray? I'll pray that God destroys America; that's what I'll pray.' That's what I said that I'd pray. And you know what? I'm going to tell you something. Do you think I want this country to continue to exist? The way it is right now, when six million kids are living with molesters and freakos? No. My attitude right now is, 'Even so, come Lord Jesus.' Okay? That's what I'm thinking about right now, because it's getting so horrible. And you know, I know that your life is so nice, and my life is really nice, and my kids and my family are nice, and I don't want my family to endure any kind of pain, and I don't want to endure any kind of pain. But what about the PAIN of the people in this country that are being abused and attacked by these people? What about the PAIN of six million kids who are growing up in a hell! That's what they're growing up in.

He then goes on to say he is going to pray for God to rain down hell on San Francisco. I went over to the website of Faithful Word Baptist Church and found that I was unable to bring up any of his sermons. I don't know if this is my problem or if they have been pulled down.

Him That Pisseth Against the Wall

I should have posted this yesterday when I first watched it. I laughed so hard when I saw it; it would have been a perfect April Fool's post. A Baptist preacher comments on a peculiar phrase from the King James Bible.



Update: Here, by the way is the passage:

1 Kings 14:10 (King James Version)

10Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel, and will take away the remnant of the house of Jeroboam, as a man taketh away dung, till it be all gone.

April's Fool

I didn't sleep too well last night and since I was already awake, in a grand gesture I got up, got dressed, made coffee and cleared the driveway to prepare for my spouse's early departure for work today. Once finished with these tasks, I sat down bleary-eyed, unmedicated, and without caffeine at my computer to check the morning e-mails and headlines.

Grist "got me". I spent about 30 seconds checking yesterdays news to see how I could have missed this story. It then dawned on me what today's date is and I smote my forehead!

Any other Grist subscribers who checked their e-mails before checking out liberalpastor in burnsville "get got"?